Local keyword research sounds technical, but at its heart it answers one simple question: what words do nearby customers actually type when they need what you sell? Get that right and every page, profile description and post you write works harder. Get it wrong and you rank for phrases nobody uses.
You do not need paid tools to answer it well.
The short answer
Local keyword research answers one question: what words do nearby customers actually type when they need what you sell? Five free methods do it well — Google autocomplete, People Also Ask, relative-interest trends, reading competitors’ pages, and mining your own reviews for customer language. Two focused hours can produce a sorted list of 25 to 30 real phrases.
Method 1: Google autocomplete
Start typing a service plus a place into Google search and watch what it suggests. Type “plumber in Leeds” and you may see “emergency plumber in Leeds”, “plumber in Leeds city centre” and “cheap plumber in Leeds” appear before you finish. Each suggestion reflects phrases people actually search.
Work through variations systematically: the service alone, the service plus each town you serve, and the service plus a problem word such as “emergency”, “near me” or “cost”. Write down every suggestion, even the awkward ones — awkward phrasing is often exactly how customers type. One caution: autocomplete reflects popular searches, not necessarily profitable ones. “Cheap plumber” may be popular and still be the wrong customer for a premium business.
Method 2: People Also Ask
On many search results pages, Google shows a “People Also Ask” box: a set of related questions real searchers ask. For a local service these might be “How much does a boiler service cost?”, “Do plumbers charge for callouts?” or “How long does a boiler service take?”
Each question is a content idea and a keyword clue at once. A business that answers the exact question, in plain language, is matching the searcher’s intent precisely. Collect ten to twenty questions for your trade and you have the backbone of a helpful content plan.
Method 3: relative interest over time
Free trends tools show relative interest in a topic over time, rather than exact search counts. That is still useful: compare two phrases to see which theme dominates, or check whether interest rises in certain months. Use this for direction, not precision, and never quote a trends chart as an exact number of searches — it is a comparison, and honest content says so.
Method 4: read your competitors’ pages
Find the three businesses that rank best for your main service in your town. Read their pages properly, not just their headlines. Note the phrases in their page titles, headings, service lists and descriptions: the neighbourhoods they name, the specific services they list, and the problems they promise to solve.
You are not copying their content. You are learning the vocabulary of the local market — the suburb names customers use, the service wording that appears again and again, and the gaps they leave. A gap is an opportunity: a service nobody lists, or a neighbourhood nobody mentions, may be yours to claim. Freelancers doing this for clients often keep each client’s research in one organised workspace so the list, the pages and the follow-ups stay together.
Method 5: mine your own reviews
Your reviews — and competitors’ public reviews — are written in customer language. Read twenty reviews for businesses in your trade and highlight repeated phrases: “turned up on time”, “fixed the leak the same day”, “explained everything clearly”. Those phrases tell you what customers value and how they describe it. This also guards against jargon: a business may call itself a “heating engineer” while every customer writes “plumber” — and your content should say plumber too.
A worked example: a plumber in Leeds
Here is an illustrative example with followable numbers, not measured market data. Imagine a fictional one-person plumbing business in Leeds starting from zero keyword research. The owner spends one focused evening, about two hours, on the five methods:
- Autocomplete across five seed phrases produces 24 suggestions; after removing duplicates, 18 remain.
- People Also Ask yields 14 questions, of which 9 are genuinely about hiring a plumber rather than DIY repairs.
- A trends comparison shows “emergency plumber” holding steadier relative interest through winter than “bathroom fitting”, which rises in spring.
- Reading the top three competitors’ pages surfaces 6 neighbourhood names and 4 services the fictional business also offers but never mentions.
- Reading 20 reviews surfaces 5 repeated phrases, including “same day” and “tidy job”.
Merged and deduplicated, the list comes to 30 phrases, sorted into roughly three groups: urgent jobs (“emergency plumber Leeds”, “plumber near me”), planned jobs (“boiler service Leeds cost”, “bathroom fitter Leeds”), and trust questions (“plumber reviews Leeds”, “how much does a boiler service cost”). The owner then plans content in that order: urgent pages first, because they match the moment a customer needs help now, then planned-job pages, then trust content. That sorting — by what the searcher wants, not by what sounds impressive — is the whole point of the exercise.
Turning the list into pages
A keyword list is not a content plan until each phrase has a job. Assign each phrase to one of three buckets: a page or post that answers it, a line in your profile description or services list, or a phrase to drop because it attracts the wrong customer. If two phrases mean the same thing to a searcher, write one page, not two. For the wider picture, a grounding in what local SEO actually involves helps, and if budget is tight, free local SEO tactics that actually work pair well with this research.
Keep the list in one document and revisit it quarterly. Language shifts: new housing estates get names, services change, and seasonal demand moves. If you do this research for clients rather than yourself, the same five methods scale, and the research itself becomes part of the service you can explain in plain language. Keeping each client’s keyword list and content plan in one client system is what keeps the work repeatable month after month.
Country differences worth knowing
One labelled note covers the genuine differences. Spelling and place words vary: UK customers search “plumber in Leeds”, Americans “plumber in Austin”, Canadians “plumber in Calgary”, Australians “plumber in Brisbane” — the method is identical, only the place names and spelling change. “Near me” searches work the same way everywhere, but the directory and review sites customers check alongside Google differ by country, so note those local names in your list rather than assuming one country’s habits apply everywhere. Never build separate keyword lists per country for the same business unless it genuinely serves customers in more than one country.
Questions owners ask next
Autocomplete keeps suggesting “cheap plumber” — should I target it?
Not automatically. Autocomplete reflects popular searches, not necessarily profitable ones, and “cheap” may be a very popular phrase that still brings the wrong customer to a premium business. This is why the list gets sorted into buckets at the end: phrases to build pages around, phrases for your profile wording, and phrases to drop because they attract the wrong customer. Popularity is a clue, not an instruction.
Two phrases on my list mean the same thing — should I write two pages?
No — write one page, not two. If two phrases mean the same thing to a searcher, they belong to the same piece of content. The sorting step exists precisely to catch this: assign each phrase a job — a page or post that answers it, a line in your profile description or services list, or the drop bucket — and merge duplicates of meaning before you start writing anything.
Which phrases should I write content for first?
The urgent ones. In the worked example above, thirty phrases sorted into three groups — urgent jobs, planned jobs, and trust questions — and the owner planned content in that order, because an urgent page matches a customer who needs help today. Then planned-job pages, then trust content. That sorting, by what the searcher wants rather than what sounds impressive, is the whole point of the exercise.
How often should I redo my keyword research?
Revisit the list quarterly. Language shifts: new housing estates get names, services change, and seasonal demand moves — a trends comparison might show “emergency” work holding steady through winter while fitting work rises in spring. Keep the list in one document, note the local place names and spellings your customers actually use, and let each quarterly pass refresh the content plan rather than restarting it.
What to do next
Spend two hours this week on the five methods for one service in one town, and finish with a sorted list of 25 to 30 phrases grouped by intent. Then write the single most urgent page first — the one that matches a customer who needs help today. If you handle keyword research and content for clients and want the workflow organised in one place, you can see the system I use on my Local Alchemist AI page.
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